Economy

According to this report, Japanese diplomats have signaled to their Russian counterparts that the returning of the Kuril Islands to Japan is “critical” as they have no other place to resettle so many people that would, in essence, become the largest migration of human beings since the 1930’s when Soviet leader Stalin forced tens of millions to resettle Russia’s far eastern regions.

There are plenty of lessons to be learned from MF Global and heart-pounding policy implications; all of which we can count on Congress to ignore at the behest of the Wall Street money and lobby machine until the next epic financial crisis – an eventuality that is growing more likely each day as Congress refuses to restore the Glass-Steagall Act, the depression era legislation that bars Wall Street securities firms from owning banks holding insured deposits.

"…Which bring us to the story du jour brought by Suddeutsche Zeitung, according to which the ECB and countries that use the euro are working on an initiative to allow cash-strapped banks direct access to funding from the European Stability Mechanism. As a reminder, both Germany and the ECB have been against this kind of direct uncollateralized, unsterilized injections, so this move is likely a precursor to even more pervasive easing by the European central bank, with the only question being how many headlines of denials by Schauble will hit the tape before this plan is approved. And if all eyes are again back on the ECB, does it mean that the recent distraction face by the IMF can now be forgotten, and more importantly, if the ECB is once again prepping to reliquify, just how bad are things again in Europe? And what happens if this time around the plan to fix a solvency problem with more electronic 1s and 0s does not work?"

Yesterday I gave a presentation to a group of distinguished business leaders. In my presentation, I tried to show that the global rate of production of petroleum and the associated lease condensate is at an all-time high or a “peak” that at a greatly expanded scale looks like a “plateau.” I used my published, peer-reviewed extensions of King Hubbert’s approach to support my arguments.

Recent research supports the conclusions of a controversial environmental study released 40 years ago: The world is on track for disaster. So says Australian physicist Graham Turner, who revisited perhaps the most groundbreaking academic work of the 1970s,The Limits to Growth.

#1 According to CNN, the level of selling by insiders at corporations listed on the S&P 500 Index is the highest that it has been in almost a decade. Do those insiders know something that the rest of us do not?

The corporate / government / banking oligarchy started the fire. The world is burning to the ground and politicians have thrown gasoline onto the fire with passage of debt financed stimulus programs, Obamacare, bank bailouts, the Patriot Act, NDAA, and a myriad of other government “solutions”. To anyone willing to think for just a few minutes, the picture is unambiguous. This requires the ability to think critically – a missing gene among the majority of Americans.

We see this today in the breakdown of faith in both corporate and government institutions (Occupy Wall Street, Tea Party movement), both of which have become top heavy, corrupt, and incapable of reform or even of adapting to changing circumstances.

We also sense this in larger societal issues: obesity; the breakdown of the family; the stratospheric use of antidepressants; crime; unemployment; the lack of community.

Energy

Production in the North Sea has been weak, and the EIU reports that exports from Iraq’s Kurdistan region (which account for about 75,000 barrels per day) have halted. In themselves, these disruptions amount to only about 1 million barrels per day, but they largely negate the increased output delivered by Saudi Arabia intended to calm fears of insufficient supply.

Nevertheless, the EIU estimates the market is likely to be in surplus this year and, providing negotiations with Iran proceed if not satisfactorily then at least without drama, oil prices should soften in the second half as weak demand meets ever-rising inventory levels.

The decade long constancy of the Middle East's total petroleum inter-regional exports, however, provides no hint of the large change in the export destinations for this petroleum over the past decade. There has been a large shift in the Middle East's exports away from the Western regions: North America, Europe, South America and Africa, as well as Japan, and, towards the East, specifically China and the remaining Asia Pacific countries. In 2010, about 74 percent of the Middle East's petroleum exports went to the latter two regions, and the trend is for this to increase going forwards.

There is no doubt that Saudi Arabia has considerable oil assets, though I have noted in the past that they tend to use the total discovered oil volume as their reserve, without discounting the amount that they have already produced. Rather, the question that will increasingly arise in the future is whether the country can continue to produce at the same rate, or – if they are to meet the claimed 12.5 mbd of achievable production - to be able to achieve a rate that is 25% higher than current levels. Not that the amount available from some older fields is not of some concern. Consider this plot that came from Aramco in 2004, when Mahmound Abdul Baqi and Nansen Saleri debated Matt Simmons at CSIS. And remember that production has continued from those fields in the eight years since.

Article suggestions for the Daily Digest can be sent to dd@PeakProsperity.com. All suggestions are filtered by the Daily Digest team and preference is given to those that are in alignment with the message of the Crash Course and the "3 Es."

The piece on the Limits to Growth was not worth the bandwidth. It was a rehash of an earlier denialist piece that I have read, but whose thread I have lost.

The comments section was worth a peek. It shows the usual gammut of reactions to the Limits. I am particularly fond of the opinion that it is all going to plan. Someone else's plan.

I see that I am not the only person that says that we have to get off this Rock.

"The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision." -Randal Monroe This is why we have to get off this rock. Until we have the tech to not be expansionist, we must expand.

Watch Tony Robbins discuss the $15 trillion U.S. national debt -- how big is it really? And what can we do about the enormous federal budget deficit?

I think Bill Whittle did a better job of this about a year ago than Tony Robbins, of course his is a bit more politically pointed - or perhaps I just like his jabs at Michael Moore. It's pretty obvious Tony Robbins copied some of his presentation from this version:

If Japan were to evacuate to China, where it does indeed have an infrastructure to accept wealthy immigrants, it would shift the balance of world power in the favor of China eventually. I doubt the Japanese would be happy there, a traditional society in a vastly different place surrounded by people that don't really like them---but in an emergency they might have to do it. {Kind of reminds me of the Hebrews moving into Egypt.} Facing that possibility, I can see Russia ceding the islands for a price to assure that the Japanese do not go to China. Is the situation in Japan that fragile? And how dangerous is the trash heading to the U.S.?

If Japan Is Broke, How Is It Bailing Out Europe? - It is interesting to note that as the International Monetary Fund wound down its semi-annual meeting in Washington yesterday, the Japanese government emerged as by far the largest single non-eurozone contributor to the latest euro rescue effort. Yes, this is the same government that has been going round pretending to be bankrupt (or at least offering no serious rebuttal when benighted American and British commentators portray Japanese public finances as a trainwreck). Japan is putting up $60 billion. That is equal to 14 percent of the total of $430 billion in pledges drummed up by the IMF’s overworked managing director Christine Lagarde. By comparison the United Kingdom with almost half of Japan’s population is throwing in a mere $15 billion, or one-quarter as much. And the U.K. actually looks generous by comparison with the United States and Canada, neither of which is prepared to proffer so much as a single brass cent. Besides Japan, the most significant contributors are Saudi Arabia and South Korea.This is not the first time that Japan has stepped up to the plate as lender of last resort to the world financial system. At the height of the global panic in 2009, the Tokyo Ministry of Finance more or less single-handedly rescued this system when it injected $100 billion into the IMF. How can a nation whose government is supposedly the most overborrowed in the advanced world afford such generosity?

Many of our readers might find it difficult to appreciate the actual meaning of the figure, yet we can grasp what 85 times more Cesium-137 than the Chernobyl would mean. It would destroy the world environment and our civilization. This is not rocket science, nor does it connect to the pugilistic debate over nuclear power plants. This is an issue of human survival.

Many of our readers might find it difficult to appreciate the actual meaning of the figure, yet we can grasp what 85 times more Cesium-137 than the Chernobyl would mean. It would destroy the world environment and our civilization. This is not rocket science, nor does it connect to the pugilistic debate over nuclear power plants. This is an issue of human survival.

Unquote

Marteen

Marteen -

This is not an issue. Former ambassadors should stick to diplomacy and leave nuclear engineering to those who understand it. The quote you provided overstates the "threat", presents numbers recklessly out of context and is nothing short of wild-eyed fear mongering.

I'd never heard of the European Union Times before this lurid article started making its way around the Internet. Here's what RationalWiki says of it:

...it is little more than a compiler and regurgitator of various news stories and a particularly unpleasant far-right leaning blog. The reporting is, without exception, shockingly unprofessional. Do not be fooled by the nice WordPress theme - this is utter neo-Nazi bollocks.

Hey, lff, your blog has some really useful information and links in it, but it would be a lot more useful if you didn't pile it all onto one page. Some of us living in remote locations don't have the fastest links, and yours almost always crashes before it loads.